The continuing rise of energy consumption of computing hardware systems installed in data centers combined with the cooling infrastructure required to provide operable conditions for this hardware has emerged as a key limitation for future growth in the field of information technology (IT). As a result, undesirable tradeoffs commonly must be made between energy/cooling requirements, space limitations and cost constraints on the one hand and increased IT performance on the other.
A key parameter used to assess environmental conditions in a data center is ambient temperature distribution. Ideally, the ambient temperature would be continuously monitored throughout the entire data center. However, due to the complex physical composition of a data center, current monitoring and/or complete computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling techniques can only either provide a one-time snapshot of the entire data center or continuous measurements in a few locations. Making continuous measurements or continuous modeling of an entire data center using conventional techniques is impractical, if at all possible, from both an efficiency and cost standpoint.
Therefore, techniques are needed to continuously monitor temperature conditions throughout an entire data center.